Bell Weather (27 page)

The apple seller tried to speak but choked and started hacking. Two women carrying baskets, who’d been coming toward the cart, frowned at Molly haughtily and walked the opposite way. Others shuffled off and kept their distance on the dock until the apple man and half the neighboring merchants were abandoned.

“Cut that out!”

“You’re killing business!”

“And me ears!”

“Scat, be off!”

My fellows, said the sailor,

Do not grieve for me

I’m married to a mermaid

In the sweet Eccentric Sea!

The apple seller grasped at her with cold, bony hands. His eyes were wider now, and raw, and threatening to pop. A burly man, slimy-aproned with a foul stink of fish, took her other arm and forced her off the trunk, saying, “Tha’s enough now. You’s injuring me finer sensibilities.”

Molly kept singing over all their protestations. A bearded sailor with a sad, flat face produced a copper, dropped it into the cap, and said, “Buy yourself a muzzle.”

Molly stopped and took the cap and looked for Nicholas, who’d vanished. In the sudden lack of song, she heard the hiss of falling snow. She curtsied to the vendors and left the dock, dragging the trunk.

Nicholas met her beside a dray at the start of the city proper, holding four grand apples he had stolen undetected. Molly laughed and flashed the coin. Nicholas grinned and bowed.

They put the apples in the trunk, all but one that Molly ate as they walked the narrow, mazy streets of center Grayport. The closeness of the buildings lent both snugness and constraint to the city, a sense that everyone was safe but too close packed, like people on a ship with overstuffed cabins. Opportunity was everywhere but so was competition, and although it seemed a perfect place for runaways to hide, it also seemed a place where someone vulnerable could vanish.

Molly and Nicholas were jostled by people who seemed fresher and more cavalier than the citizens of Umber. It was freedom, Molly thought, from the governance of Bruntland, a mother country too far away to fully parent. Everyone they saw showed vitality and purpose. Even the drunks and beggars seemed to know where they were going.

The siblings spent their copper on a hearty loaf of bread. They tore it into chunks and chewed it as they walked, but their hours of discovery were terribly fatiguing, and they could linger only so long in shops or public houses without a show of money. The snow eventually stopped but the temperature plummeted in the late-day sun. Dragging the trunk had worn Molly out and Nicholas was wan. They came to a tavern at the outskirts of the city, where the streets petered out to show the wilderness beyond. The sky was bloody wool. A lamplighter passed, igniting salt-encrusted lanterns, and the streets looked cozy in the hard-biting cold. They heard a fiddle and a hornpipe playing in the tavern, smelled the meat and pies and biscuits, watched the patrons come and go.

Nicholas took Molly’s hand and led her to a church. It was tiny, gray and black with a tall sharp steeple. They went inside and huddled in a corner in the dark. Molly wiped her eyes, looking up beyond the rafters. Nicholas thought and thought, staring at the floor.

*   *   *

They lived by hook or crook for the first few days, stealing what they could and begging for the rest, until they each found employment and rented a small, drafty flat in the rougher section of Grayport’s central district. By midwinter, Molly had worked as a scullery maid, a seamstress, and a serving girl in three separate taverns. She had been fired from every position for cheek and ungovernability, and had been forced to start again each time without references.

One evening after a long, futile search for new employment, Molly walked to the Customs House, a noble brick building, four stories high, with a newly added portico and a clock tower overlooking the waterfront. Nicholas had found clerical work there, thanks to his aptitude with figures and his fluency in several languages: qualities of worth in a city with so many foreign sailors, so many ledgers and restrictions. It was a position Nicholas loathed but one he had to keep; even when Molly held a job, they could barely pay the rent.

The sun had set on all but the face of the Customs House clock, and Molly paced the shadowy docks and gazed across the sea. She had a vision of her father, well-attired, in his study.

News of the Bread Riot Massacre had arrived from Umber in early winter. Seventeen dead, dozens more wounded. Inquests were held and protests were staged, but ultimately the rioters were demonized, having instigated the bloodshed with countless acts of violence, theft, and vandalism. To stabilize the peace, fixed prices were enforced once more throughout the markets and Umber carried on, bruised but not destroyed. General Bell, so recently the nation’s savior in war, was generally portrayed as a hero and a victim. Molly didn’t know whether he had remained in Worthington Square. For all she knew, the home she’d come to miss was nonexistent.

She left the wharf at nightfall and met Nicholas at the Customs House door. Her appearance there surprised him for only a moment. Then he said with leaden certainty, “Another fruitless day. Perhaps it’s you, and not employers, who are being too selective.”

“I can always be a laundress. How I’d love to be a governess,” she said, feigning hope.

Nicholas wounded her with laughter. “Who would trust you with their linens, let alone their children? The streets would soon be full of underboiled urchins.”

They began walking home through the tight-knit crowd in a city still foreign, still coldly unfamiliar. Little coin and many worries were the whole of their existence. Molly glowered at a coffeehouse stuffed with rosy people. Salty gray slush leaked through her shoes.

A fellow with a long crooked nose bumped her shoulder.

“Excuse me, miss!” he said. “I wasn’t looking, thousand pardons.”

When she turned around to answer, he had blended with the crowd.

“Open your cloak,” Nicholas said, reaching for her collar.

“What are you doing? Nicholas, stop.”

He pried apart her hands, saw her throat, and narrowed his eyes.

“Wait for me at home,” he said.

Before she understood or could summon a reply, Nicholas had walked away and she was suddenly alone.

She called his name and followed him, but no—he’d turned a corner. Then a horse was in her way and she was forced to move aside, and it was only upon refastening her cloak that she discovered her locket was gone. The only valuable thing she owned, with Nicholas’s tooth! She hurried through the streets, unsure of where to go, less concerned about the locket than she was about her brother as he chased a practiced thief to God knew where. What if there were others? Didn’t thieves have dens? What if Nicholas were cornered in an unlit yard, bludgeoned in a house, and never seen again?

For almost two hours she checked the side roads, marketplace, and docks, all the time with billowing dread that she had lost him altogether. How would she survive without a job or ready money, having no place to live and no means of sailing back?

“Rotten spoiled girl!” she said, upbraiding herself for selfishness and drawing wary looks.

When the cold shrank her down and the search was clearly useless, she returned to their icy flat, shivering and despondent. Watchmen rarely patrolled their part of the city and the streets were barely lit. She braved a shortcut between a pair of derelict houses, where the weeds were frozen dead and snagged her skirt, and climbed the creaking outdoor stairs to their door, relieved she had a key but jealous of the landlady’s late mutton supper. Molly paused a moment, savoring the wonderful aroma. She considered going down and begging for a plate, but how could she indulge herself with Nicholas in danger? So she turned the frozen key to face the dark, spartan flat.

She opened the door to heat and light. A lantern burned, the iron stove was full of burning coals, and Nicholas sat at the table with a roasted chicken, a golden loaf of bread, and a bottle of wine he had opened but not yet poured.

She rushed to hug him in his chair and he was warm, very warm. He backed her off and rubbed her hands to foster circulation. Molly cried in her relief, and laughed, and said in anger, “I’ve been searching half the city, thinking you were dead, and here you are with dinner! O, you hardhearted fiend!”

“I said to wait at home,” he answered, unperturbed.

She called him many things and cursed him many ways. Nicholas took her cloak and stood her at the stove. He poured her a cup of wine—they had tin instead of glass—and Molly gulped it down with no awareness of its flavor.

Nicholas held her locket up. It dangled by its ribbon, delicate and twisting, glinting in the light.

“Oh!” Molly said. “But how—”

“I used persuasion.”

Molly stood with jellied legs, recalling Mr. Fen.

“Is he jailed? Is he—”

“Free. Not to trouble us again.”

He handed her the locket, poured his own cup of wine, and sipped it with attention, savoring the vintage.

*   *   *

Two days later, Molly sat alone in the flat mending a tear in Nicholas’s only spare shirt. She daydreamed of Frances, who had taught her how to sew and had been doing so herself, in the little green room of the country manor, on the evening Lord Bell had announced her dismissal. Molly longed to write her letters but Nicholas wouldn’t allow it. What if Frances’s employers intercepted such a letter? What if Lord Bell had asked for their assistance, hoping to discover the location of his children? Molly understood but would have risked it anyway, and she had spent a quarter hour recalling the sound of Frances’s voice, and how she used to dab her nose with a monogrammed handkerchief, when someone ascended the outdoor stairs and knocked upon the door of the flat.

No one ever knocked. No one visited at all. Nicholas wasn’t due for at least another hour, having planned to finish his day at the Customs House and inquire after a printmaking job across the city. In Molly’s reverie, the daylight had fallen to the dark, and now the person at the door was playing with the lock. She stood and grabbed the shovel used for cleaning out the stove. It was iron, square-headed with a reassuring heft. She raised it when the lock and then the door gently opened.

In walked a stranger, magisterial and tall, and she might have cracked his skull if not for his ebony skin.

Rich,
Molly thought.
From the bright Aquatic Islands.

Aquarians were a prominent minority in Grayport, hailing from a small, wealthy country in the Solar Ocean. Molly had seen them often in the city that winter, riding carriages or walking from the harbor to the Customs House. Not every Aquarian was affluent, but they were foreign and imposing and possessed of native pride. One assumed a higher pedigree and generally the assumption was correct; Molly—poor and plain—was outside their sphere.

“Good evening, Mrs. Smith,” the stranger said, doffing his hat with a bow and exposing his head to the shovel. “My apologies for entering so. I knocked and no one answered.”

He addressed her with the slow, melodic accent of his country. It was a voice that took its time without being dull, rather like a cello at a comfortable andante. He was sensibly dressed for winter in a bearskin hat, knee-high boots, and a fur-shouldered coat that added to his broadness. Molly backed away, speechlessly confused, until the stove felt near enough to scald her derri
è
re.

“My name is Kofi Baa,” he said. “I am a shipowner residing here in Grayport. Your husband suffered injuries in aid of me tonight. A hired man is carrying him up even now.”

Molly dropped the shovel. Kofi Baa stepped aside, untroubled by the clang, and she had nearly reached the stairs when a short, swarthy man carried Nicholas inside.

“Jacob!” Molly cried.

Nicholas smiled coyly. His carrier had the misshapen nose and knuckles of a boxer, but he placed her brother upright in a chair as gently as he might have placed a child. Nicholas’s forearm was crudely wrapped and bloody.

“What happened?” Molly asked, kneeling at his feet.

Nicholas gave her a look as if to say:
Best behavior.

Kofi handed the swarthy man a large silver coin and said, “We thank you for your efforts.”

The man bowed and left.

Kofi closed the door and said to Molly, “Please allow me to explain so your husband may collect himself. This evening I followed a familiar shortcut after business at the Customs House, unwise of me in retrospect, and found myself at knifepoint, alone beyond the docks, at the mercy of a brigand who demanded all I had. He seemed inclined to use the knife when your husband, silent as a grave cat, tackled him and grappled with the man upon the ground. I admit to being startled by the unexpected rescue. By the time I gained my wits, the villain had escaped. Your husband broke his ankle and was slashed along the arm.”

Tackled,
Molly thought,
and grappled on the ground?
If not for the sincerity of Kofi Baa’s telling, she’d have laughed at the absurdity. Her brother in a brawl!

“I used my handkerchief to bind the wound,” Kofi said, “and summoned a passing jack, just departed, to assist us.”

“But you must see a doctor!” Molly told her brother.

Nicholas touched her cheek, very like a spouse.

“I have already sent for one,” Kofi said. “He will be ably stitched and splinted.”

“Thank you,” Nicholas told him. “Molly, don’t be frightened. We could all use a drink, if I may trouble you to pour.”

“Yes, of course,” Molly mumbled, suddenly aware of the flat’s crooked squalor. It was tiny and dim with cracked plaster walls, a very low ceiling with a fur of old salt, and no furniture aside from the table, chairs, and two lumpy mattresses positioned near the stove.

Molly uncorked their one bottle of wine and poured it into a pair of cups—the only two they owned—for Nicholas and their guest. Kofi recognized the shortage and said, “Formality should never do disservice to a lady.”

He handed her his cup, gave the second cup to Nicholas, bowed to each in turn, and drank directly from the bottle. Then he encouraged Molly to sit while he stood beside the stove, making easy conversation while they waited for the doctor.